Site Mobile Navigation

In Anthrax Scientist’s E-Mail, Hints of Delusions

WASHINGTON — Bruce E. Ivins went to work each day in a high-security federal laboratory where he handled some of the world’s deadliest substances. But more than a year before the 2001 anthrax attacks, the scientist admitted to himself that he was losing his grasp on reality.

“Paranoid man works with deadly anthrax!!!” he wrote in one e-mail message in July 2000, predicting what a National Enquirer headline might read if he agreed to participate in a study on his work.

“I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind,” he added a month later in another message to a colleague. “It’s hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I am being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don’t spread the pestilence.”

He continued, “I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there’s nothing I can do until they go away.”

These e-mail messages and dozens of others are a central element in the case the Federal Bureau of Investigation laid out on Wednesday against the man they say is responsible for the anthrax attacks that killed five people and panicked the country. They provide glimpses into the personality of a man obsessed with a sorority that he first encountered while an undergraduate, asserting in an e-mail message that the women’s group was waging a “fatwah” against him.

Dr. Ivins composed poems — scripted to the nursery rhymes “Hickory Dickory Dock” and “I’m a Little Teapot” — about having two personalities. And he went on what he called “mindless drives” to mail gifts and letters anonymously, the document said, and then “set back the odometer in his car” to fool his wife.

Dr. Ivins’s friends and family had argued that his suicide last week and proceeding mental decline was provoked by being the target of F.B.I. investigators who questioned his family and followed his every move in the last year. But the records released on Wednesday make it clear that Dr. Ivins, a microbiologist who worked at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., had suffered from mental problems long before.

None of the e-mail, his lawyers point out in asserting their former client’s innocence, ever threatened a biological attack or acknowledged responsibility for one. The messages do, however, show that Dr. Ivins privately confided to an unidentified co-worker that he was deeply troubled.

A forensic psychiatrist consulted by the F.B.I. found that Dr. Ivins had been treated with antidepressants and anti-anxiety and antipsychotic medication, according to the documents.

An Army spokeswoman said researchers at Fort Detrick must undergo background checks by the F.B.I. before they may work with biological agents and toxins like anthrax. Employees are required to report “potentially disqualifying” medical problems or use of prescription drugs. Supervisors who notice that employees are under particular stress or are acting abnormally can block them from entering the high-security space. But Dr. Ivins was not barred from access to biodefense agents until November 2007, when his house was searched and guns were found. At that point, he was the leading suspect in the anthrax attacks.

Photo

Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, above, in 2003, killed himself after being investigated by the F.B.I. for nearly 18 months.Credit
United States Army

His e-mail messages provide a narrative of his paranoid episodes, dating to 2000. On June 27, 2000, Dr. Ivins wrote, “the depression episodes still come and go.” On July 4, 2000, he wrote, “The thinking now by the psychiatrist and counselor is that my symptoms may not be those of a depression or bipolar disorder, they may be that of a “ ‘Paranoid Personality Disorder.’ ” On July 23, 2000, he said, “Sometimes I think it’s all just too much.”

And on March 4, 2001, he said of his psychiatrist, “He’s not that easy to talk to and doesn’t really pick up on my problems.”

His anxiety could be traced, the documents suggest, at least in part to complications that cropped up with an anthrax vaccine project he was working on in the late 1990s, which drew complaints from some Defense Department personnel who claimed the vaccine, which was mandatory, made them severely ill.

“I think the **** is about to hit the fan bigtime,” one July 2000 e-mail message said. “The control vaccine isn’t working. It’s just a fine mess.”

The stress, Dr. Ivins said, along with other difficulties he claimed to be having at home, led him to a recurrence of the anxiety he said he felt years before as he was going off to college at the University of Cincinnati in the late 1960s. His state of mind seemed to worsen after the 2001 terror attacks.

“I’m the only scary one in the group,” he wrote on Sept. 26 after a group therapy session eight days after the first anthrax-laced letters were mailed. On Oct. 16, as the first victims were dying , one of his co-workers observed in an e-mail message, “Bruce has been an absolute manic basket case the last few days.”

By December 2001, Dr. Ivins began writing poems to himself about what he said were the “two people in one,” meaning “me+the person in my dreams.” In one, he wrote:

I’m a little dream-self, short and stout.

I’m the other half of Bruce — when he lets me out.

When I get all steamed up, I don’t pout.

I push Bruce aside, then I’m free to run about!

Some neighbors and friends, who have described the scientist as a quirky, somewhat meek man who juggled and played the piano, had expressed doubts about the government’s claims about him. But on Wednesday, several acknowledged they were surprised at the evidence of his long-term psychological problems.

“This is not anything I would have ever imagined,” said Bonnie Duggan, a neighbor who knew Dr. Ivins for nearly two decades. “But it does not make me want to draw a solid line from Point A to Point B.”

Richard G. Rappaport, an associate clinical psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, who examined the court papers at the request of The New York Times, said Dr. Ivins appeared to exhibit psychotic characteristics. It was possible, Dr. Rappaport said, that he was faking his mental ailment, in an effort to draw attention to himself. But he said he wondered why Dr. Ivins had been allowed to continue to work for so long in a high-security biodefense laboratory.

“Everyone who does this is not crazy,” Dr. Rappaport said of Dr. Ivins’s e-mail and statements. “But it is pretty apparent he had psychological problems. “He may have been on the fringe where he was able to still function, even if he did not function well.”